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mbone writes "Earlier today there was a confirmed Google outage which got a lot of attention from network operators. From a post to NANOG after everything calmed down: 'Google ack'd a maintenance on their core network did not go as planned-Forced traffic to one peer link that was unable to handle all the traffic. Maintenance has been rolled back. Issue has been restored.' This is exactly what makes me nervous about cloud computing and data storage. It's bad enough when I screw up a config and it takes down my mail, but what about when it happens to the entire globe at once?" Several readers also point to CNET's coverage of the outage.
Update: 05/14 19:25 GMT by T: CWmike adds this: "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that what may be happening is a massive DDoS attack. Based on the size of the attack that would be needed to interfere with Google, I believe that it's quite likely to be the result of an attack from the controllers of the Windows worm, Conficker. Another theory that has been put about — that the problem was due to AT&T NOC routing problems — does not appear to hold water, writes Steven."Update: 05/14 21:01 GMT by T: Google's put up a low-detail explanation on their blog that says "An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions."

Yes, but the Admins' "Oops" comments were a cover-up. This outage was not due to an error during maintenance.

This outage was a sign that Gatus and Joba are having some success in their quest to thwart Googol the Destroyer [slashdot.org]; apparently, not only are they getting converts in their efforts to have all the world's sorcerors collaborate on the One True Operating System with Global Search, but they (or someone else) has launched an effort to delay the work on the Rite of a Million Targeted Ads by Googol the Destroyer and his acolytes.

Who is responsible for the guerrilla attacks on Googol the Destroyer, his acolytes, and his crack team of evil underlords? How are Gatus and Joba faring on their recruitment of the world's sorcerors? What has Stallmanx been working on in his secret laboratory*? Will we ever find out what lies beneath his Beard of Druidic Prowess? Answers to these questions and more will be revealed in the next two episodes!

Remember, kids, tune in to next week's episode (look for it Tuesday or Wednesday) of Googol the Destroyer!

1) Text messages sent from the web got duplicated. One person got near 10 duplicates in quick succession. I also got duplicate messages back.2) My number doesn't work. If you call it you get a "Currently unavailable"3) A few calls that came in before the outage aren't showing up in the Received/Missed calling list.

I've noticed some inconsistencies on my companies finance.google page. It seems to be giving two different values for gains and losses for the day, the one on the graph is correct but the one at the heading is not. It also lists our company as one of the related companies, something that it has never done before.

I've got to wonder just what the hell happened here. Major and unusual issues across nearly all of Google's services? This isn't going to be good for Google's brand image.

strange. my Firefox 3.0.10 got somehow affected by this outage. it just refused to open! it loaded about 30Mb of data to RAM but went nowhere from there. the browser window never appeared. and i tried to re-launch it several times, but for no avail!
very odd.... anyone else had problems with it? Opera -- although not able to open Google.com -- opened fine!

The OUTSIDE MMO.. great graphics (if your video hardware can handle it), like AWESOME resolution, and there's billions of players. You can even make real money if you know the right cheats to use. But it's an expensive monthly subscription...

When it's just your mail server down, everyone else gets annoyed at you because you're not {gett,receiv}ing mail they're {sending, expecting from} you. When the cloud is down, everyone can just chill and be thankful that they're not going to log on to find a whole stream of new emails.

This sucks for docs though but using a completely cloud based doc solution is a bit mental. Even if you're mobile it's best to have a local copy to save on battery life.

Browsers should be smarter about that. Maybe if they remembered that certain hosts are down and so stop trying to load scripts from them? They could periodically retry unreachable script-hosts in the background and then ask the user if they wanted to reload all relevant tabs.

The problem with remotely hosted scripts isn't just limited to Google or cloud apps, it's a more general issue and browsers should be able to handle it with grace.

Browsers should be smarter about that. Maybe if they remembered that certain hosts are down and so stop trying to load scripts from them? They could periodically retry unreachable script-hosts in the background and then ask the user if they wanted to reload all relevant tabs.

What does the unicorn burger taste like in this mystical land in which you live?

I was requesting a feature btw, browsers should just be smarter about javascript hosts being down. If you load a webpage that references a script from a different domain and then that script times out whilst trying to load, it wouldn't be hard to just have a record of unreachable scripts.

Every time you try to load a remote script just check against the unreachable scripts and see if it's OK to try asking for that script again. This would be great for when

e-mail is supposed to be reliable because of its distributed nature. It is not supposed to be on single "cloud", distributed machines should be caring for it. It is just like XMPP vs. old fashion MSN/AIM etc. junk.Let me show what I see with the "cloud" (which is one of the worst abused terms) right now:(wget)s3.amazonaws.com[72.21.207.242]Saving to: `423.dmg'

You seem to be missing the point of what I'm saying. When your email server is down, you can't send or receive mail. This leads to lots of irate phone calls about why you haven't replied to or sent some email. When everyone's email is down, you get the occasional call about how it sucks that email is down because so-and-so wanted you to do <trivial task>.

Even better, more complicated things that involve moving attachments have to be postponed which leaves you to catch up with your real work! Plus nobo

Notes or contacts causing important meetings to be missed or leaving attendees un/less prepared. It's easy to say back everything up, but in the real world under stress (or laziness, or stupidity) you tend to stick with simpler work-flows. I like Saas for non-critical applications, maybe it's an age thing or maybe critical service/hosted solutions are simply still new enough that the kinks in reliability haven't been fully worked out.

This is exactly what makes me nervous about cloud computing and data storage. It's bad enough when I screw up a config and it takes down my mail, but what about when it happens to the entire globe at once?"

If it bothers you then use a mail client to download your mail from Google. As someone that has been using my gmail account all week I didn't even notice a problem, the whole thing seems overblown.

The problem wasn't just mail. Any site that used Google for web statistics, mapping, or other services that Google offers was affected. For example, certain online banking systems use Google Analytics. These were affected.

The problem wasn't just mail. Any site that used Google for web statistics, mapping, or other services that Google offers was affected. For example, certain online banking systems use Google Analytics. These were affected.

Strange, I am responsible for several sites that use Google analytics and I had a nice quiet day. They are fairly intensively monitored so if this had affected us I would have heard horrible alarms going off and clients ringing us.

If it bothers you then use a mail client to download your mail from Google. As someone that has been using my gmail account all week I didn't even notice a problem, the whole thing seems overblown.

I've had a lot more lost Google downtime caused by power outages or ISP service interruptions than I've had with Google being down. So, yeah, I agree with you, very overblown. Doesn't matter how dependent we are on the cloud, we still cannot take the internet for granted.

Gmail has IMAP support too, which is what I use (in Thunderbird). It keeps track of your "starred" items and the read/unread status of each mail message (which is updated in realtime in the web interface too).

Having run my own mail server, and used mail servers run by companies I work for, I'll -gladly- take GMail's track record for reliability. Even with no 'guarantee', it's been a hell of a lot better than anything else I've experienced.

And what's -really- the difference between a server going down locally that affects you and a server going down globally that affects you? Nothing.

>>And what's -really- the difference between a server going down locally that affects you and a server going down globally that affects you? Nothing.

Actually, I disagree. There is a difference. If it's local and I own it, I have to fix it. If it's outsourced and Google owns it, I sit back and let Google fix it. Which is nice.

ThePlanet.com had a bad switch install a few days ago which brought down part of our cloud. Our website was down, as was our access to Google DNS gave an IP down there for Google. If you look at the last year, the cloud solution has had a better uptime than what I was providing computing in planned maintenance, patching, updates and all.

It was nice to leave at 5pm, knowing ThePlanet would fix the switch and get us back up. And they did. It's a lot easier to gripe about the cloud being down and sit back, than to manage and fix your own local servers switches and such. When you get to managing hundreds of servers, it becomes time to know what to outsource.

The flip side is, if it's local and important to me, I'll make fixing it a priority. If it's important to me and I DON'T have control, I just have to hope that it's reasonably important to whoever can fix it, or I'm screwed.

Well, I've administered a lot of mail servers over the years, and even when I've announced an outage, it's pretty much guaranteed that I'll get a phone call within 30 seconds of taking the machine down.

I've noticed Gmail having problems quite often lately. Mostly the inbox can't load, times out, whatever. Not that I'm complaining though. It's free, and I can keep a copy back here for when they go under.:) I just don't look forward to copying my mail back up to my own server. It

This is what happens when all your engineers are too smart... they build things for their level of skill, and then when something goes wrong there's nobody even smarter to call in to fix it.

In this case, google builds this fantastically complicated yet simple global filesystem and series of interdependent services that make up their search and apps. Then something goes wrong like say their enormous bandwidth temporarily exceeded by a site backup (or whatever) and dominoes start falling all over each others

I was not affected at all by this outage (I have been using gmail all day, no lie) but that could be because I am using offline gmail... but I was sending and more importantly receiving mail. I guess it could have happened and been over before 6:08 pacific... no, it looks like it happened later. I have replied mails from all around that time.

I have seen gmail outages before, so I don't really know why this is allegedly news. None of them lasted long though. Maybe they were just rewriting my email or somethi

If my email server goes down for an hour, I probably won't even notice. But if the adservers are down, causing the whole internet to run slower than Vista on 512MB, I not only notice but get very annoyed.

If a life is not lost, there are no worries with cloud computing (hence, cloud computing should be used for non-life critical services, gmail is a perfect example).

Of course, VCs may have lost revenue, Capitalists may sweat from loss stock trades, teenagers may lose that one twitter about how cool Miley is to them, some adult may not get that date tonight from craigslist, you may miss that one Hulu commercial, some K-12 kid may not be able to send out his homework, some college kid can't access his pirate bay music lists, or the USPoTC may miss that extra minute to promote his stimulus bill.

In the end, I hope cloud services shows us that we are not slaves to time. The human race has advanced enough to know that already. And really, if "the cloud" is down for an hour, maybe you should go outside and enjoy the wonders of nature and peace for once, or talk to someone physically. It begs to ask the question: "can it wait?"

For good or for ill, the Internet has become rather important for the functioning of society, and it is only getting more so as time goes by. Compare it to any other piece of infrastructure.

Recently here in the bay area, we lost part of the MacArther Maze (the interchange of 580, 880, and 80 on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge). You can trivialize by saying that the tool plaza may have lost revenue, the bus line may sweat from loss of fares, some adult may not get that date tonight to the SF restaurant, you may miss that one baseball game, some K-12 kid may not be able to get to the zoo, etc., or you can recognize that the bay bridge is one DAMN IMPORTANT piece of infrastructure that makes waves if it is down.

There is a lot that relies on cloud services, many more than you may realize. That is why there are binding QoS contracts. When something goes down, it costs money and time. While you can route around the damage, or maybe take a vacation for the day, that does not mean that failures are unimportant. When you say, "If a life is not lost, there are no worries with cloud computing", you trivialize any loss other than life. The recent housing downturn didn't cost lives, but it did cost jobs, homes, and retirement incomes, to name a few. Sorry, when a major Internet service goes down, someone had better "the F* care".

If we're talking about the same outage that caused google advertisements to hang forever this morning, it caused access to many unrelated websites to hang, including slashdot itself. This seems like a really bad single-point-of-failure issue. If a site can't display ads, shouldn't it come up anyway?

It's bad enough that I have to wait tens of seconds for Captcha content to pop up long after a login page has loaded.

This is starting to get annoying. If this is "cloud computing", I'd rather stay on earth.

Of course since I have Google Analytics and adsense in my hosts file, those websites never gave me any problems this morning. I started this in 1998 when I was on dialup because it sped up the loading of many websites as doubleclick and others simply bogged down.

You're telling me; I start getting reports from users all around the office that sites are failing to respond -- looks like a bigtime BGP barf, but then I realize it's all google ads and google analytics hanging pages all over creation. I couldn't think of a good way to mitigate this other than to blackhole Google's Georgia datacenter, and I figured by the time I did that, Google would have it fixed. Imagine my surprise when they didn't after a few hours. I guess there's a first time for everything.

I don't work for them, i don't hold their stock, and I am not (currently) a customer, so I have no skin in their game, but Internap as a BUSINESS MODEL, becomes more important.

If you are a major company that comes to rely HEAVILY on Cloud Services, you want to insure that you have on-ramps into several Tier-1 providers ALL AT ONCE, without having to contract individually with 4 or 5 of them yourself. I predict more companies will mimic this model of aggregation, essentially handling the business of BGP optimization for customers, and handing customers 2 redundant pipes and saying "hey, don't worry if San Fran has an earthquake and these peering points blow up, we'll get you out via this Tier-1 backbone over to your cloud computing provider's service via this backbone within seconds. Let us handle that."

Especially with ISPs that get into pissing matches, like when Cogent and Telia got into it, and cut each other off. If you had Cogent as your only ISP, you were screwed if you wanted to get to a bunch of Swedish sites, because Cogent's CEO was trying to play chicken over some tariff rates. The cloud computing model will no longer tolerate that, it's not just some website, it's a BUSINESS function.

Many sites rely on Google in ways that aren't immediately evident - for instance, during the outage, Google Analytics connections were lagged, which meant that all our our sites that incorporate Analytics were ALSO lagged.

What's amazing is the extent to which an outage on a single entity can bring down ALL of the other entities that surround it -- not just those who rely more visibly, e.g., Google Docs., on their services.

I thought maybe something had corrupted my Firefox session at the time... I suspected Google was having problems, so I went to E*Trade which was failing to load just about anything except text. I don't see any references to Google or ga.js on E*Trade's pages. But, E*Trade does rely heavily on Akamai servers. If it was a DOS attack, it may have affected Akamai, too (either as the subject of a separate direct attack or an indirect victim of traffic generated by Google's problems).

It's bad enough when I screw up a config and it takes down my mail, but what about when it happens to the entire globe at once?

I was reading this comment and it occurred to me that the latter is actually preferred. With the first option, your systems are messed up, but everyone else wants you to continue to conduct business. With the latter situation, your systems are down and so are the people who would normally be trying to reach you.

In this case, none of my systems were down, and I wouldn't have known that there was a problem if I hadn't heard from outside, as my connection to Google goes through Cogent, and that seems to have been unaffected.

This speculation from the ComputerWorld blog doesn't belong in the post. Even the blog author says its conjecture. Especially ridiculous since the NANOG post in the second link already explained that the problem was a routing error at Google.

Finally someone commenting with some sense. It kills me to read all the "Great Job! Google!" and "Bravo!" comments. This exposes a serious flaw in planning, design and change management of a very heavily relied upon resource.

Nope. Not true. Take a look at the actual uptime of Google services like Gmail. They barely qualify for 99.9% uptime. Anywhere from an average of 15-30 minutes a month of downtime.

99.999% is doable with their resources. I have run a few very critical systems/networks that achieved 99.99% no sweat on a shoestring budget. The problem is that no one ever thinks past what the reality of their availability is. It is nowhere near reliable enough for most major corporations or mission critical apps. It's essential

I'm going to say "yes" to all points you made. I'd rather see companies die because they made stupid decisions that led to their death opposed to being rewarded with free money. Sometimes things need to be culled for progress to happen.

Yep.The banks should ahve failed. Since 70% of are economy is driven by consumption, giving the money to the 109 million tax payers would have been better for the economy.Other banks would replace them.

Hell I'd go so far as to say any loans they can't sell, get returned to the borrower.Yeah, there would eb a cascade, but banks wuld still be here, we would still be here, and in the mean time fewer people would be giong hungry and/or loosing their jobds.

Hence the reason why we need a whole storm of clouds... and some APIs for submitting the same jobs to multiple clouds. If one goes down you start sending them off someplace else (maybe someplace slower or more expensive) for the duration of the outage.